Some people suffer from chronic eating disorders, including anorexia and morbid obesity. The neural circuitry of the brain that controls eating and satiety include neurons in the lateral hypothalamus (feeding) and the ventral medial hypothalamus (satiety). U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,188,104 and 5,263,480 describe the use of electrical stimulation for treating eating disorders where the electrical stimulation was applied to the vagus nerve or to the trigeminal and/or glossopharyngeal nerve.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,782,798 describes a method for treating an eating disorder in a patient by stimulating and providing a drug to the central nervous system, in particular the paraventricular nucleus, lateral hypothalamus or ventral medial hypothalamus.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,950,707 describes a method for preventing an eating disorder in a patient by applying stimulus to the nucleus of the solitary tract.
While the aforementioned can provide some treatment and/or prevention of an eating disorder, the methods are not effective in the long term because they do not address many of the underlying behavioral factors and their underlying neurological causes that create and sustain a variety of eating disorders as well as disorders of those behaviors that contribute to eating disorders. Therefore there remains a need to provide further improvements to treatment methods for eating disorders, and their underlying behaviors, that will further improve the long term success of their efficacy.